i'm not reading hippie paulo coelho. i was seduced by the title and the 60's groovy bubble type, and the brilliant orange dust jacket. sexy and cute. however the contents are awkward and weird and fail to groove me, baby. i knew that name but i did not know he was a hippie, and he himself seems to wonder what a hippie was, was he? i would like to give a fuller review, but i was not engaged enough to read past page 24. therefore this is no review. i want to say i love hippies, but i have an admixture of feelings about them. i was too young to join them and i fear i would have had the same trouble i had in my social group, which was really just myself, though i hid in plain sight with the freaks. there was an appellation, hippie freak, but at my school we were just freaks, we didn't know about hippies in the spiritual wasteland of illinois. we had to seek further for peace and love. or just do drugs. my uncle was a hippie in san francisco i thought. he wore patchouli and fringe and said some words liquidly, but in his closet he stored man-boy porn. this was not a good introduction. but i kept growing my hair longer and longer anyway, along with my resistance. he fucked me up, but i resisted him. later he was exiled from the city, cryptically, vaguely, remotely romantically. golden gate, bridge of sighs and suicides.
you know what? i still love hippies, not my sad uncle, sadly, because they tried at least 
to turn on and drop out, and this culture is the very antithesis of peace and love, and 
the hippies were right, though pathless and often gone mad, twisted, astray.

postscript. r. says i was a burnout, not a freak. in her school. yeah i remember burnouts. i guess i was. burnouts sounds sad for a teenager. it was, mostly. some kids did actually burn out, on pcb's, in car crashes. now it gets maudlin, see how it goes from groovy vibes to the dark scratchy long players? anyway, we agree, we both wanted to be hippies. r. saw the footage of the flower children girls throwing off their tops. i remember going to a nudist lake on vacation in california, hundreds of naked beauties, and being so proud and growed up i drank it all with my thirsty vision and didn't even get a hard-on! we were too young, born in the wrong place. but hey! it's never too late!